This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 37, October 23-29, 2005
Stories of
hunger, oppression, government neglect, landlessness, greediness of
agro-chemical transnational corporations, to democratic protest movements and
armed struggle for genuine land reform and social change in Asia-Pacific are
narrated by farmers and advocates of agrarian reform in the region during a
recent conference in Negros Occidental.
By Ranie Azue
TALISAY CITY,
Negros Occidental - Farmers and advocates of agrarian reform in Asia-Pacific
countries now attest to how they have been victimized by the World Trade
Organization’s (WTO’s) neo-liberal policies and programs of re-concentrating
vast agricultural lands in the hands of the big landlords and TNCs, destroying
local agricultural production and producers, and making them mere dumping
grounds of agro-industrial imports.
Stories of hunger,
oppression, government neglect, landlessness, WTO and World Bank destructive
policies, greediness of agro-chemical transnational corporations, to democratic
protest movements to armed struggle for genuine land reform and social change in
various parts of Asia-Pacific, were narrated in a two-day research conference on
agrarian reform sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Research Network (APRN) and
Pesticides Action Network-Asia Pacific (PAN-AP) in this city, central
Philippines.
Farmer-leaders,
NGOs, land reform advocates and social researchers from Philippines, India, Sri
Lanka, Nepal, Mongolia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan participated in
the conference held Oct. 17-18.
Neo-liberal offensives
Neoliberal
policies in agriculture have wreaked havoc on ASPAC economies, and displaced
millions of farmers and agricultural workers, conference speakers said.
Gilbert Sape of
the PAN-AP and member of Coalition of Agricultural Workers International (CAWI)
noted that “globalization” driven by WTO, transnational corporations (TNCs),
international financial institutions and supported by national elites, have
ruined the lives and devastated food sovereignty, resources and the environment.
As a result, millions have lost their livelihoods, rights to food, shelter,
land, water, seeds, forests and other resources.
Millions are now
faced with increasing unemployment, the increasing use of child labor, bonded
form of labor and forced migration, Sape also said. These adverse forces have
reduced peasants and agricultural workers of Asia Pacific to a form of redundant
labor, making them more vulnerable to exploitation, oppression and
subordination.
Sape also said
giant corporations like Syngenta and Monsanto in collaboration with local landed
elites have monopolized and promoted productive resources and means of
production through corporate agriculture. This form of agriculture is
ecologically unfriendly, externally dependent and promotes hazardous
technologies including pesticides and chemicals that threaten or pose danger to
health, food safety and the environment.
Marlo Abaja of the
APRN, on the other hand, added that the global economic, political, social, and
cultural spheres are controlled by neo-colonist forces that are well positioned
and entrenched. Through its power and influence, the State it is able to
violently suppress people's movements and resistance, and to criminalize and
imprison movement leaders.
There is also the
increased use of force through militarization to break up strikes and workers
mobilization, Abaja said. Agricultural worker leaders are even being killed,
kidnapped or detained and tortured under the bogey of the “war on terror.” It is
used to dismantle all mechanisms that protect and promote the universal rights
of people, he added.
Sape raised the
alarm over the scheme of TNCs in the Philippines to use NGOs, people’s
organizations (POs) and local government units (LGUs) to promote social
acceptability for their corporate agriculture and disastrous technologies among
the farmers and farm workers.
In some countries
in the region, including the Philippines, he revealed, agro-chemical TNCs are
not only pouring in millions in advertisements to promote themselves with a
“benign image,” but also support for LGUs, NGOs and POs in promoting their
products in the guise of sustainable agriculture, nature-friendly organic
technologies, and food security.
Land reform
Participants in
the conference agreed that land reform programs in Asia Pacific have grossly
failed because they did not alter existing skewed class structure.
Dr. Azra Talat
Sayeed, founder of Roots for Equity, a development NGO in Pakistan, said land
reform programs in most Asia Pacific countries, including in her country, are
dismal failures because they have been designed and implemented in response to
international capitalist pressures to avert revolutionary responses by
peasantry, and to legitimize oppressive regimes.
Land reform laws
in these countries have taken a market-led orientation, i.e., “letting the
market forces dictate the value, production and management of lands,” she said.
Citing Pakistan’s
own experience, Dr. Azra after the British colonizers left the country following
independence in 1947, military rule took over. Most agricultural lands were
never given to peasants and farm workers but were usurped by big landlords while
others were sold to transnational corporations. Most Pakistanis, she said, do
not even know that a Land Reform Law exists.
Biplap Halim of
the Institute for Motivating Self-employment in Governments in Calcutta, India,
said that the land reform program in his country that begun in the 1970s failed
because it was very much a compromised program, loophole-ridden. Ownership
ceilings and prices of lands were disadvantageous to poor farmers. The absence
of farm support system, coupled by pressures from big landlords and TNCs, have
forced millions of supposed recipients of land reform sell their lands to big
landlords and private corporations.
The implementation
of liberalization of India’s agriculture in the 1990s has only worsened the
inequitable land structure of the country, Halim said. TNCs with government
support have seized vast tracts of land and promoted corporate farming, contract
growing, oriented and massive production of cash crops for exports, he said.
He also said that
the growing problem of poverty and hunger in India is linked to the basic
problem of landlessness. “A growing number of people are hungry because they
don’t have access to food producing resources, no access to lands,” he said.
Agnes Vimala of
Society for Rural Education and Development India agreed with her colleagues,
stressing however that women are often the worst victims of government’s land
reform policies. She said, in India’s patriarchal system, women are either not
allowed to own the lands or are forced to work in the farms like slaves the rest
of their lives.
She said, women
work longer than men, receive low wages, and more vulnerable to hazards of work.
These conditions often forced women to leave farms and migrate to urban centers
only to end up as slaves in commercial stores and prostitution dens.
She also said that
the failure of land reform program in the countryside has direct correlations
with the growing cases of crimes and social unrest not only in the rural areas
but in urban centers as well. In farms operated by TNCs where big plantations of
flowers for perfumes are produced, women’s groups affiliated with Vimala’s group
uncovered a number of women farm workers that have developed deceases in their
ovaries.
Siva of Human
Development Organization of Sri Lanka said that the neo-liberal policies in
agriculture in his country have not only rendered government’s agrarian reform
inutile, but also undermined the country’s food security and the social security
of most agricultural workers.
In Indonesia it’s
even worse, said Erfan Faryadi, Secretary General of the Alliance of Agrarian
Reform Movement (AGRA). The mere talk or issues about genuine land reform have
been long considered a taboo in Indonesia. The lack of programs for genuine land
distribution has been the root for growing unrest in the country, he said.
The land reform
problem in Indonesia is no different from countries in the Asia Pacific. It is
also market-led, giving more bias to big landlords and TNCs now swarming
Indonesia’s countryside.
In Mongolia,
revealed Delgermaa of the Center for Human Rights and Development, the land
reform program of their government has retaken all lands given to farmers and
farmworkers since the 1990s in favor of the implementation of Land reform policy
paper of IMF-WB setting prices for lands at higher value, and giving priority to
TNCs and big landlords and capitalists to own lands for commercial ventures.
She said this has
threatened the food security of her country.
Carl Anthony Ala,
public information officer (PIO) of KMP, said that the growing dissatisfaction
of farmers and agricultural workers toward government land reform programs, is a
common trend in Asia Pacific. But this is a good sign, for it means, peasants
are looking for better alternatives, he added.
Philippine experience no different
The Philippines is
no different, said Danilo Ramos, KMP secretary general. “All the land reforms in
the country since 1960s to the present’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program
(CARP), have all been failures because they were crafted by big landlords,
compradors and bureaucrats,” he said.
Ramos said the
main problem in the Philippines is still landlessness. Citing official data, he
said, out of every 100 farmers 21 are agricultural workers, 28 are unpaid family
workers, 26 are under some form of tenancy relation and only 25 own land. Seven
out of 10 do not own the land they till. On the other hand, only few families
control vast tracks of lands; 60 percent of the agricultural lands are owned by
13 percent of landowners. The biggest landlords, only 9,500 people, own more
than 20 percent of all agricultural lands in the country.
The CARP, said to
be former President Corazon Aquino’s centerpiece program, turned out to be a
huge graveyard for Filipino peasants, Ramos said. It’s clearly pro-landlords and
pro-TNCs as evidenced by all sorts of exemptions and conditions for evasion in
the course of its implementation.
Jennifer Malonzo
of IBON Databank and Research Center explained that market-oriented land reform
program being implemented by the GMA administration is a direct assault on
farmers and agricultural workers because it is nothing but “a land transaction
between willing buyers and sellers.”
These take the
forms of voluntary offer to sell, stock distribution option, joint venture
agreements, and numerous other land distribution evasion schemes, she stressed.
Truth is, she
said, there is no actual expropriation of private lands for distribution, only
voluntary land transaction, using property as collateral in the credit market.
Karl Ombion of the
Center for Investigative Research and Multimedia Services (CIRMS) expounded on
Malonzo’s report by citing the case of Eduardo Cojuangco, Jr’s Joint Venture
Agreement cum Corporative Scheme in Negros Occidental, where instead of
transferring his 1,200 hectares of lands to farmworker agrarian beneficiaries he
offered them stocks to his corporate venture company. ECJ still controls the
“financing, production, development and management of the venture,” Ombion said.
Ombion also cited
several SDO schemes being implemented in Negros, and similar other programs of
land reform sans land transfer.
More displacements and killings
Ramos added that
Macapagal-Arroyo’s full implementation of neoliberal policies particularly her
adherence to “WB’s market-assisted land reform program” and her agriculture
modernization program, have further displaced millions of already landless and
poor peasants.
Peasants resisting
these neoliberal onslaughts have been brutally suppressed by the President’s
state security forces. To date, peasants still bear the worst records of human
rights violations, Ramos said. Bulatlat © 2005 Bulatlat
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Stories of Hunger, Landlessness
and Armed Struggle
Asia Pacific farmers, advocates meet in
Negros conference
Bulatlat